The Scepter's Return Read online

  Lanius suddenly realized he’d wasted half an hour poking through the action reports. They weren’t what he wanted, which didn’t mean they weren’t interesting. He put them back on their shelf, not without a twinge of regret.

  Here? No, these were new. The shipwrights who’d built deep-bellied, tall-masted ships like the ones the Chernagor pirates sailed across the sea had sent King Grus reports on their progress. Grus, a sailor himself, had no doubt appreciated the papers. To Lanius, they might have been written in guttural Thervingian for all the sense they made. When Grus comes back to the palace, I’ll have to ask him about them, he thought.

  He was squandering more time. He muttered to himself. The trouble was, everything in the archives interested him. He had to make himself put aside one set of documents to go on to the next. Sometimes—often—he didn’t want to.

  The sunbeams slipping through those ever-dusty skylights slid across the jumble of the archives. Lanius found himself blinking in mild astonishment. How had it gotten to be late afternoon? Surely he’d gone in just a little while before.… But he hadn’t. His belly was growling, and all at once he noticed he desperately needed to piss.

  Sosia was going to be angry at him. He hadn’t intended to spend the whole day in here. He hardly ever intended to. It just … happened. And he still had no idea where that miserable traveler’s tale was.

  Grus, Hirundo, Pterocles, and Otus all solemnly looked at one another on the walls of Anna. Grus peered across the Stura toward the southern bank. It still didn’t look any different from the land on this side of the river. But it was. Oh, yes. It was. No King of Avornis had set foot on the far bank of the Stura for a couple of hundred years. The last king who’d tried invading the lands the Menteshe claimed as their own hadn’t come back again.

  That could happen to me, Grus thought. That will happen to me unless Pterocles’ magic really works—and I can’t find out for sure whether it works till we cross, the river and start trying it on thralls.

  “Well, gentlemen, this is going to be an interesting campaigning season.” By the way Hirundo said it, he might have been talking about training exercises on the meadows outside the city of Avornis.

  “We can do it.” That wasn’t Grus—it was Otus. The escaped thrall sounded confident. The trouble was, he would also sound confident if the Banished One still lurked somewhere deep inside his mind. He would want to lead the Avornans on so the Menteshe and his dark master could have their way with them. He continued, “This land should be free. It deserves to be free.”

  “We’ll do our best,” Grus said. Suddenly, harshly, he waved to the trumpeters who waited nearby. They raised long brass horns to their lips and blared out a command.

  River galleys raced across the Stura. Marines leaped out of them and rushed forward, bows at the ready. No more than a few Menteshe riders had trotted back and forth south of the river. The nomads were—or seemed to be—too caught up in their civil war to care much what the Avornans were up to. Grus hoped they would go right on’ feeling that way. He hoped so, but he didn’t count on it.

  Barges followed the river galleys. Riders led horses onto the riverbank, then swung aboard them. They joined the perimeter the marines had formed. Most of the cavalrymen were archers, too. Anyone who tried to fight the Menteshe without plenty of archers would end up in trouble.

  The royal guards came next. They were lancers, armored head to foot. The Menteshe couldn’t hope to stand against them. But then, the Menteshe seldom stood and fought. They were riders almost by instinct. Grus hoped he could pin them down and make them try to hold their ground. If he could, the royal guards would make them pay. If not … He refused to think about if not.

  Instead of thinking about it, he nodded to the general, the wizard, and the man who’d lived most of his life on the far side of the Stura. “Our turn now,” he said.

  They descended from the wall. Grus’ boots scuffed on the gray-brown stone of the stairs. Out through the river gate he and his comrades went, out onto the piers, and aboard the Pike, the river galley that would take them over the Stura. The captain raised an eyebrow to Grus. The king waved back, urging the skipper to go ahead at his own pace.

  “Cast off!” the captain shouted. The ropes that held the Pike to the quay thudded down onto the ship’s deck. As Grus had waved to the captain, so the captain waved to the oarmaster. The oarmaster set the stroke with a small drum. The rowers strained on their benches. The oars dug into the water. The Pike began to move, slowly at first, then ever swifter. Soon, very soon, she lived up to her name, gliding over the chop with impressive speed and agility. “She’s going to beach,” Grus said, bracing himself against the coming jolt. His companions, lubbers all, lurched and almost fell when the pike went aground. Grus had all he could do not to laugh at them. “I told you that would happen.”

  “You didn’t say what it meant, Your Majesty.” Otus sounded reproachful.

  “Well, now you know,” Grus said. “The next time I tell you, you’ll be ready.” Or maybe you won’t. Making a sailor takes time.

  At the skipper’s shouted orders, sailors lowered a gangplank from the river galley’s side. It thudded down onto the muddy bank. With a courtier’s bow, Hirundo waved for Grus to descend first. The king did. He took the last step from the gangplank to the ground very carefully—he didn’t want to stumble or, worse, to fall. That would set the whole army babbling about bad omens.

  There. He stood on the southern bank of the Stura, and he stood on his own two feet. No one said anything about omens. He knew everybody who could see him was watching, though. “We’ve started,” he called.

  Up at the top of the gangplank, Pterocles and Hirundo argued about who should go next. Each wanted the other to have the honor. At last, with a shrug, the wizard came down by Grus. “Just standing here doesn’t feel any different,” Pterocles murmured. “I wondered if it would.”

  It felt no different to Grus, either, but the wizard could sense things the king couldn’t. Hirundo descended, and then Otus. The ex-thrall still had no special rank, but everyone who did was convinced of his importance. By the look on his face, he too was trying to tell any difference from what he’d known before. He found only one. “Now I’m here as a whole man,” he said. “I hope all the thralls get to see this country the way I do.”

  Attendants led up horses for Grus and Hirundo, mules for Pterocles and Otus. Sailors sprang out of the Pike and shoved the river galley back into its proper element. Grus mounted his gelding. He looked back across the Stura toward Anna. The Avornan town seemed very far away. The barges on the river—some full of men, others with horses, still others carrying wagons loaded with supplies—were less reassuring than he’d thought they would be.

  He looked south again. He’d advanced less than half a mile from Anna’s walls. Suddenly, as though he’d gone in the other direction, everything in the Menteshe country seemed much farther away than it had.

  Several sessions of sifting through the archives hadn’t yielded the traveler’s tale Lanius wanted. He refused to let himself get angry or worried. If the mice hadn’t gotten it, it had to be in there somewhere. Sooner or later, it would turn up. It wasn’t anything he needed right this minute.

  He had other things on his mind, too. When Grus left the capital, Lanius turned into the real King of Avornis. All the little things Grus worried about while he was here fell into Lanius’ lap now. As he had more than once before, Lanius wished Grus were here to take care of those little things. Grus was not only better at dealing with them but also more conscientious about it. Lanius wanted them to go away so he could get on with things he really cared about.

  The treasury minister was a lean, hook-nosed, nearsighted man named Euplectes. Unlike Petrosus, his predecessor, he didn’t try to cut the funds that supported Lanius. (Petrosus was in the Maze these days, but not for that—he’d married his daughter to Prince Ortalis. Ambition was a worse crime than keeping a king on short commons; he’d surely had Grus’ support in t
hat.)

  Peering at Lanius and blinking as though to bring him into better focus, Euplectes said, “I really do believe, Your Majesty, that increasing the hearth tax is necessary. War is an expensive business, and we cannot pull silver from the sky.”

  “If we increase the tax, how much money will we raise?” Lanius asked. “How many townsmen and peasants will try to evade the increase and cost us silver instead? How many nobles will try to take advantage of unrest and rebel? What will that cost?”

  Euplectes did some more blinking—maybe from his bad eyesight, maybe from surprise. “I can give you the first of those with no trouble. Knowing the number of hearths in the kingdom and the size of the increase, the calculation is elementary. The other questions do not have such well-defined answers.”

  “Suppose you go figure out your best guesses to what those answers would be,” Lanius said. “When you have them, bring them back to me, and I’ll decide whether the extra money is worth the trouble it costs.”

  “King Grus will not be pleased if the campaign against the Menteshe encounters difficulties due to lack of funds,” Euplectes warned.

  Lanius nodded. “I understand that. He won’t be pleased about an uprising behind his back, either. How much do you think the chances go up after a tax increase?”

  “I will … do what I can to try to calculate that, but only the gods truly know the future,” Euplectes said.

  “I understand that. Do your best. You may go,” Lanius said. Euplectes went, shaking his head. Lanius wondered if he’d done the right thing. Agreeing to the tax hike would have been simplest. He didn’t want to hinder the war against the nomads. But Avornis had seen too many civil wars since the crown came to him. Now the Menteshe were suffering through such strife, and he wanted them to be the only ones.

  He hoped to get away to the archives after seeing Euplectes, but no such luck. He’d forgotten a man who’d appealed to him for a pardon after being convicted of murder. He had to go over the documents both sides had sent up from the provinces. He hadn’t ridden south with Grus, but now a man’s fate lay in his hands.

  He studied the evidence and the convicted man’s desperate appeal. Reluctantly, the king shook his head. He didn’t believe the man’s claim that a one-eared man had fled the house where the victim lived just before he went in. Nobody from the village had seen anyone but him. He’d been standing over the body when someone else walked in. He’d quarreled with the victim over a sheep not long before, too.

  Let the sentence be carried out, Lanius wrote at the bottom of the appeal. He dripped hot wax on the parchment and stamped it with his sealing ring. He often worried about such cases, but felt confident he’d gotten this one right.

  A servant took the appeal with his verdict to the royal post. Before long, Avornis would be rid of one murderer. If only getting rid of all the kingdom’s troubles were so simple!

  Lanius had just started for the archives when he almost bumped into another servant coming around a corner toward him. “Your Majesty!” the man exclaimed. “Where have you been? The queen has been waiting for you to come to lunch for almost an hour now.”

  “She has?” Lanius said. The servant nodded. Lanius blinked in mild amazement. Was it that time already? Evidently, and past that time, too. He gathered himself. “Well, take me to her.”

  He never did make it to the archives that day.

  King Grus had seen thrall villages from a distance as he looked from Avornis into the lands the Menteshe held. That did nothing, he discovered, to prepare him for the first thrall village he rode into.

  He knew it would be bad even before he rode up what passed for the main street. The breeze came from the south, and brought the stink of the place to his nostrils while he was still some distance away. He coughed and wrinkled his nose, which did no good at all. The muscular stench was the sort that clung to whatever it touched. Avornan villages smelled bad. Any place where people lived for a while smelled bad. This … this was far beyond smelling bad. Filth and vileness had accumulated here for a long, long time, and no one had cared—or perhaps even noticed.

  “I’ve never known a battlefield that stank like this, not even three days after the fighting was done,” Hirundo said.

  Grus wasn’t sure the stench was that bad. But the thralls lived with it every day of their lives. How anyone could do that without going mad was beyond the king. He turned to Pterocles. “Now we start to see how good our magic is.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.” The wizard, usually cheerful, sounded somber. “Now we do.”

  Ordinary peasants—peasants who were ordinary human beings—would either have run away the minute they saw the Avornans coming near or else would have run toward them, welcoming them as liberators after a long, hard occupation. The thralls did neither. They didn’t seem to care one way or the other. The ones who were out in the fields kept right on working there. The ones in the village went on about their business. Only a handful of them bothered to stop and give the Avornans dull, uninterested stares.

  Presumably at the Banished One’s impulse, thralls had crossed into Avornis a few years before. Otus was one of them. Grus knew something of the squalid life they led. Seeing them on their own home ground, where they’d lived like this for generation after brutish generation, struck him as doubly appalling.

  A fly buzzed around his face. Another one lit on his earlobe, still another on the back of his hand. All around him, other Avornans were swearing and swatting. This is early springtime, Grus thought. How bad do the bugs get later in the year? A few thralls brushed languidly at themselves. They might have been horses switching their tails in a meadow. More of the luckless wretches in the village didn’t even bother. Were their hides dead along with their souls?

  Grief etched harsh lines in Otus’ face. “I lived like this for years,” he said. “The only way you could tell me from my swine was that I walked on two legs, and some of my grunts were words. Now I know better.” He held out his hands in appeal to Grus. “We have to free these people, Your Majesty. They could be just like me.”

  “Avornis could use more people just like you,” Grus said. As long as the Banished One isn’t looking out through your eyes, he added, but only to himself. He wished the doubt weren’t there, but it was, and it wouldn’t go away. He did his best to keep it out of his voice. “We’ll see what we can do to free some of the ones here. Pterocles!”

  “Yes, Your Majesty?” the wizard said.

  “You’ll do one, and I’ll want one of the other wizards to do one as well,” Grus said. “We have to make sure you aren’t the only sorcerer with the knack. If you have to free thralls one at a time, you’ll take a while to do it, eh?”

  “Er—so I would, Your Majesty.” Pterocles sounded as though he wasn’t sure whether Grus was joking. Grus wasn’t sure, either. Pterocles asked, “Shall I start right now?”

  “Tomorrow morning will do,” the king answered. “We’ll want to make sure we have a strong cordon around this place. We can’t have the Menteshe trying to take it back while you’re in the middle of a spell.”

  “They’d have to be crazy to want it back,” Hirundo said. “If I were a nomad, I’d say take it and welcome.”

  “You might. We can’t be sure they will,” Grus said. So far, less than a day into their push south of the Stura, the Avornans had seen scattered scouts. Grus hoped the Menteshe were still busy murdering one another. He wanted to make his foothold south of the river as firm as he could before the nomads tried to throw him back.

  He slept in a pavilion upwind from the thralls’ village. Some of the stink from it reached him even so—or maybe that was the more distant stink of a downwind village. Despite the foul odor, he slept well. The first part of the invasion, and maybe the most dangerous, had gone well. He’d got his army over the river. Now he would see what happened next.

  When he woke up, he realized he’d been foolish the night before. Crossing wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t most dangerous, either. Losing a battle, fall
ing into the hands of the Menteshe—that would be dangerous. He might find out what thralldom was like … from the inside.

  The first wizard Pterocles had chosen to free a thrall with him was a bald, gray-bearded man named Artamus. Both sorcerers bowed to King Grus. “I’ll do my best, Your Majesty,” Artamus said. “I’d like to see it really done before I try myself, if you don’t mind. I think I know how everything’s supposed to go, but you always like to watch before you go and do something yourself.”

  “Seems reasonable,” Grus said. Pterocles nodded.

  Royal guards brought two thralls to the king’s pavilion—a man with a scar on his forehead and a woman who might have been pretty if she weren’t so filthy and disheveled, and if her face weren’t an uncaring blank mask. “If I have first choice …” Pterocles smiled and nodded to the woman. “What’s your name, dear?”

  “Vasa.” By the way she said it, it hardly mattered.

  “Pleased to meet you, Vasa.” Pterocles began swinging a bit of crystal on the end of a chain. Vasa’s hazel eyes followed it as he went back and forth, back and forth. Grus had watched this once before, when the wizard worked the spell on Otus. The king looked around for the ex-thrall. There he was, standing in the shade of an almond tree, watching intently but keeping his distance.

  Pterocles waited, watching Vasa’s eyes follow the swinging crystal. When he thought the time was right, he murmured, “You are an empty one, Vasa. Your will is not your own. You have always been empty, your will never your own.”

  “I am an empty one,” she echoed, and her voice indeed sounded empty of everything that made ordinary human voices show the character of the speaker. “My will is not my own. I have always been empty, my will never my own.” Even parroting that much was more than a thrall could usually manage.